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Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West by Alan F. Segal Doubleday, 2004 880 pp., $37.50 |
Contemplating death and judgment, many have come to the conviction of that Southern writer on things Christian and spiritual, Robert Benson, who recalls a conversation with a priest who spoke about the all-inclusive and conquering love of God:
One of us who was listening asked Father Kelly what that sort of thinking did to his concept of heaven and hell. "Oh, I believe there is a hell all right," he said, flashing his grin again, as though he had heard this question before, and from some folks who were more theologically imposing than we were. "I just do not believe there is anyone in it."1
Of course there are those who suspect mischief behind the grin of the priest; indeed, at least since Dante, many have already taken the opportunity to tell us who will be where. And then there are others—the majority today, probably—who prefer evasive tactics. But not Alan Segal, who meets the subject head-on in Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (the subtitle appears in a slightly different form on the dustjacket). Segal, the Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College (Columbia University), asks straightforward questions: Is heaven (or hell) merely the projection of our own hopes and fears? Is all our talk about the afterlife a justification for this present life and a warrant to get others to fall in line? Is it merely rhetoric for expressing our moral values?
Life After Death is a wide-ranging, massively erudite, but readable survey of ancient views of the afterlife, with stops in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, ancient Israel, Iran, the classical world (mostly Plato), and then a long stop in the Second Temple period with serious looks at Daniel (where we are treated to mini-soliloquies on stars and angels), the apocalyptic writings, and early and patristic Christianity, followed by long stops with the rabbis and Islam. At each stop Segal works to show the correlation between values on earth and their warrant in the afterlife.
The Apostle Paul provides but one notable test case for Segal. For Paul, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, the (real) body would be raised indeed, but (somewhat in contrast to the views of many of those same contemporaries) the raised body would be a "spiritual body." Though Segal does not adequately expound the paradigmatic passage in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, focusing instead on 1 Corinthians 15, his study of the nature of the resurrection body in Paul provides an opportunity to explore a sociological hermeneutic for an Apostle who seems to be "between two worlds": the apocalyptic Jewish world, where the resurrection of the body is real and earthy, and the Greek (post-Platonic) world, where instead the focus is on the immortality of the soul. In Segal's reading, Paul's theological background among the apocalyptists and his missionary drive to speak to Greece created the need for both sorts of lives after death: in the intermediate state one has immortality of the soul until the final state, where one is granted the resurrection of the body. And here Segal points us to the correlation between one's vision of life here and now and warrants for that life in the afterlife. In short, his book presses us to ask this question: Is the Church's witness to redemption in Christ simply an illustration that, in the words of the Peruvian savant Mario Vargas Llosa, "societies have the religions they require"?2
We should pause to note that, a year or so before Segal's book appeared, N. T. Wright published his massive tome The Resurrection of the Son of God, in which he charged contemporary biblical scholars with smuggling their own preoccupations into the text, turning "resurrection" into a metaphor for "life after death." Wright drove the point home that both the Testaments witness to a belief instead in re-embodiment or, as Wright so cleverly put it, "life after life after death." Scholarship, Wright argued, needs to alter its view. For Segal, in contrast, the mischief of viewing life after death "from below" is inevitable, all we really can do, and ultimately a good thing. In our projections we discover who we are. Perhaps we need to hear this more clearly, even as we dissent from Segal's conclusions. Doesn't much of what we think heaven will be like—the heaven of popular imagination—boil down to what we'd like heaven to be, what we need in order to justify our present life?
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